The cancel culture on the social media: Writing features and writing tones of the cancellers on Twitter in Malaysia

Cancel culture is on the rise in social media platforms, contributing indirectly to damaging one’s reputation and mass cancellation movement. This study is aiming investigate the phenomenon of Cancel Culture on Twitter in Malaysia during the Movement Control Order (MCO) period, which was from March till May 2020 by looking into tweets. Objective 1 seeks to identify the issues or behaviours that lead to someone being cancelled on Twitter in Malaysia during MCO period, objective 2 attempts on examining the writing features of the cancellers, and objective 3 is to analyse the ‘cancellation’ writing tones of the cancellers. The study is using a mixed method research design in which the quantitative aspects is through the use of Frequency Analysis Tool and AntCoc software while the qualitative method is through textual analysis which allows for the tone in writing to be investigated in a systematic way. The study finds that (1) issues that lead to someone being cancelled on Twitter in Malaysia during MCO period are offending the B40 class, plagiarism of products and marketing concept as wells as domestic violence, (2) Each writing features (lexical, syntactic, structural and content-specific) has a specific distinctive result which shows the overview of how the cancellers on Twitter in Malaysia during the MCO period were tweeting their cancellation tweets using the features, (3) ‘cancellation’ writing tones of the cancellers had a negative communication climate. Writing features here are the structure in writing while the writing tones refer to the manner of tweets used by the cancellers to cancel an individual. Thus, these aspects affect the way the social media community perceive a cancellation. The influences of writing features and writing tones in cancellers are discussed and analysed in this study to obtain the effects towards cancel culture